About

This is my personal website, which I first created in 2005.

textshape — shaping text to create meaning

I came up with this name for my website when I was working as a technical writer and writing was paying my rent. The website was a place for me to share what I learned when playing around with software in my free time, mostly Linux-related.

I have moved on since professionally, and even though language in all its forms is still close to my heart and I am still a dedicated debian user, this website now serves solely as my home on the internet.

Maybe in the future I'll again feel the need to share my thoughts with the world.

More about me

You can find me on LinkedIn and XING.

How I built this website

Arriving at the current version of this website has been quite a journey. I started out with web pages written in basic html using Netscape's WYSIWYG html editor and then moved on to several different layouts handcrafted in php and css (using the Bluefish editor).

After not touching the website for several years, not least because writing content in the existing design was quite tedious, I wanted to have a simpler website design again. I found it in pelican, a website generator which lets you write all the content in markdown notation and generates static web pages. Having only static web pages vastly reduces the attack surface of the website and eliminates the need to constantly having to worry about updates for a content management system, too. For the layout I modified the notmyidea theme.

Logo

The logo is based on a letter taken from the 1655 publication "Kunstrichtige Schreibart allerhand Versalien oder AnfangsBuchstaben der teütschen, lateinischen und italianischen Schrifften aus unterschiedlichen Meistern der edlen Schreibkunst zusammen getragen, by Bey Paulus Fürsten Kunsthändlern, Nürnberg.". I found this great book via the Public Domain Review website, which I can highly recommend.

Fonts

The Font Roboto is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The Font Yanone Kaffeesatz is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1 and copyrighted by The Yanone Kaffeesatz Project Authors. Thank you!